She has been a core faculty member in the Department of Political Science at Bridgewater State University since 2006, where she teaches public and nonprofit management, American government, and civic engagement courses, and for ten years she directed the Massachusetts Certified Public Manager programme housed at the university.
Her research on organisational resilience, adaptive capacity, and citizen engagement has appeared in Public Administration Review, Administrative Theory & Praxis, and other journals in the field, alongside work reviewing manuscripts for academic publishers and journals. Outside the classroom, Kluver has held leadership roles in arts and children’s literacy organisations in Rhode Island, including eight years as Director of Development for the Chorus of Westerly and five years as Executive Director of Opening Doors for Westerly’s Children.
In 2024, Kluver founded The Black Crow Publishing, LLC, a company built around independent literary work with a focus on women’s voices. Her own book, A Woman Remembers (everything), written under the pen name J. Byrd, was published through the imprint in April 2025. It marks her first work of creative writing after years of academic publishing.
Kluver’s career traces an unusual line from grant management and neighbourhood organising in Omaha, Nebraska, to development work and executive leadership in Rhode Island’s nonprofit sector, to a faculty post she has now held for close to twenty years. Founding a publishing company in her late career stage adds a new chapter to that line, one built on decades of writing, editing, and organisational know-how.
Interview With Jodie Kluver
You’ve spent close to twenty years teaching public and nonprofit management at Bridgewater State University. How did you first end up in that field?
I came to it through practice before theory. I spent years working inside nonprofit and public organisations in Nebraska, in grant management, neighbourhood organising, and programme direction, before I moved into teaching. By the time I started at Bridgewater State in 2006, I had already seen how these organisations actually run, which is different from reading about it in a textbook. That practical background shaped how I teach.
Before teaching, you worked inside nonprofit organisations for many years. What did that experience teach you?
That the sector runs on people doing more with less, constantly. I worked on an elder abuse and sexual assault training partnership for the City of Omaha, and I directed programming for an outreach programme in gerontology at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. Both jobs required pulling together people from very different disciplines, law enforcement, health care, social services, and getting them to work toward one goal. That skill, coordinating across difference, turned out to matter in almost every role I’ve had since.
You later served as Director of Development for the Chorus of Westerly and then as Executive Director of Opening Doors for Westerly’s Children. How did those two roles differ?
Development work is specific. You are building annual funds, running auctions and galas, managing major gifts and grants, and your success is measured in dollars raised against a target. Running an organisation as executive director is broader. You are responsible for the whole operation, not one function of it. Moving between the two gave me a fuller picture of how a nonprofit sustains itself, which connects directly to the research I do on organisational resilience.
In 2024 you founded The Black Crow Publishing. What led you to start a publishing company at this stage of your career?
I had spent years editing and managing publications for a professional organisation in public administration, so the mechanics of putting out written work were familiar to me. What I wanted to build was something focused on independent literary work, particularly work that gives space to women’s voices. After decades in academic and nonprofit writing, I wanted a venture built around creative work instead.
Your first book, A Woman Remembers (everything), came out under the pen name J. Byrd. Why write under a pen name?
The book is personal in a way my academic writing never was. Using a pen name let me separate that work from my professional identity as a researcher and put the writing itself in front of readers, rather than my CV.
How does your academic research on nonprofit resilience inform how you run Black Crow as a business?
My research looks at how organisations adapt and sustain themselves under pressure. Running a small publishing company means living that question day to day rather than studying it from a distance. Every decision about what to publish and how to resource it is a small test of capacity and sustainability, which is the exact subject matter I have spent years researching in other organisations.
What surprised you about the publishing side of this work, coming from academia and the nonprofit sector?
How much of it overlaps with nonprofit management. Publishing an independent title requires the same mix of budgeting, relationship building, and patience that running a development office or a small nonprofit does. The audience and the product are different, but the underlying operational work is familiar.
What does a typical week look like now, between teaching and publishing?
It is split between preparing and teaching courses at Bridgewater State and handling the work that comes with running Black Crow, from editorial decisions to the practical tasks of keeping a small company running. The two sides inform each other more than I expected when I started.
